YashLabs

At the close of 2009, it is time to revisit my past predictions and see how I fared. I find that with time, my blog has become more self-referential as things I have envisioned years ago – sometimes up to 4 years ago – become validated or progress in the general direction I foretold.

1. Google Telecom, Hello! – July 2nd, 2007

I envisioned then as TechCrunch had featured a rumour that Google was going to buy GrandCentral, that Google was bent on becoming a Telco or ISP themselves.

The acquisition of GrandCentral and mobile ambitions – The Google phone?

GrandCentral provides you with one phone number linked to all your existing phone numbers, and many other features (thanks to Techcrunch for this great overview) through its website and also through your mobile.

There have been rumors of the Google phone before, and such a device with the mobile Google applications, linked to all the Google integrated goodies mentioned above would be pure bliss for managing and sharing data and event information with contacts when either online or offline thanks to Google Gears.

Google’s killer move

Here is what I predict will happen with Google Telecom. Based on the current state of Telecom, i.e. VOIP disrupting the industry with the old Telcos still charging too much while there are cheaper VOIP offers like the Gizmo Project, Skype, VBuzzer and Jajah, Google will adopt a similar strategy to Google Apps. With Google Apps, Google has a tiered access: free access for users and paid access for businesses.

I believe Google Telecom will offer free calls locally and worldwide to fixed telephone lines and mobiles to individual users and basic paid access for businesses and bring a more severe disruption of the Telecom industry as it will rely on getting more advertising through these channels. Alternately, Google could use the Google Web infrastructure to position itself as an ISP and offer free Internet access to all too.

That’s a killer strategy, and they can pull it off. Beautifully at that.

2. How Apple will revolutionize music-making – March 11th, 2007

Months before the launch of the iPhone, I foresaw how the multi-touch device will change the way we make music, essentially because multi-touch is organic and enables the use of the device as Midi controllers.

However, the iPhone and the iPod Touch are a little too small for a big revolution. The forthcoming tablet will be different. Being bigger, we can expect many more practical uses like playing virtual instruments live, using the tablet as a virtual mixer and sequencer and so on.

Conclusion

The whole experience of how you make music within a sequencer with virtual instruments is about to be revolutionized by Apple with a forthcoming combination of multi-touch hardware and software based on Logic and running on at least Leopard.

The very act of recording, manipulating and producing music on a computer will become an organic performance in itself.

I don’t know when it’s coming, but I do know it’s soon, probably this year, and it’s going to be Apple and Leopard+.

The Next three ones come from a long post called The Web O.S., Web 2.0, yubnub and YashNub dated October 10th, 2005.

A revolution is under way. It is one of those times when technologies developed separately converge and congeal. From this emerges a new system that is better than the sum of its parts.

3. The Web O.S. / The Cloud – October 10th, 2005

This begs the question of how to propagate technical requirements to an underlying platform to enhance the end-user’s experience with Web 2.0.

The first point of contact is the user’s browser.
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My view of the Web OS is that it must be a combination of the computer’s OS and the browser. …

Given Firefox and AJAX and great web services, there will be an increasing migration of desktop applications to remotely hosted locations on the web. Of course, not all applications can be hosted this way yet – desktop installed apps will still be around for a long time.

But assuming increased hosted services, it is a simple and logical step to envision that the computer OS can itself be tweaked for Web 2.0 usage. In other words, you could enhance existing Web support, but in addition, you could also strip an existing computer OS from any superfluous capabilities and code. You would then obtain a low-cost alternative to the bloated (and sometimes expensive) OSes currently available.

These WebOS 2.0 PC’s, being cheaper, could be used to power schools, especially in developing and third world countries and businesses alike.

Businesses would also benefit of broadband connections to leverage hosted services.

Although schools in poor areas may have broadband, they would still benefit of the network architecture: imagine just one server providing the necessary web services to a class of pupils. They could all be writing their assignment with a software like Writely.

The whole of the software service maintenance is outsourced – this is less costly in time and money for anyone using a PC with Web OS.

Of note recently is the announcement of the partnership between Google and Sun for cross-marketing of their services. This fuelled a lot of speculation about whether a Web version of StarOffice would be in the works. In addition, people have been talking about a possible Google browser and GoogleOS.

I envision the future Web O.S. to be a stripped down Linux distribution with subsequent enhancements. And the single distribution which is poised as the best contender has to be Mark Shuttleworth’s forever free Ubuntu Linux.

Based on the above, I don’t think Google is preparing a browser or O.S. Because both the browser (Firefox) and the Computer OS (Ubuntu Linux) already exist, it doesn’t seem to be a good strategy to me.

4. Firefox – October 20th, 2005

In December 2009, Firefox overtakes IE 7 to become the Word’s most popular browser.

Firefox

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My weapon of choice in this area is Firefox and it should be yours too. Mozilla’s awesome open-source browser is highly customizable through a variety of extensions. A personal favourite is GreaseMonkey which allows you to install scripts that personalize the browsing experience of some sites, removing annoyances in some cases or enhancing functionality in others.

My view of the Web OS is that it must be a combination of the computer’s OS and the browser. The advantage with a browser like Firefox is that it is already cross-platform and standards-based. It is therefore a candidate of choice for basing any development of the Web 2.0 services.

I also praised Firefox in this other post in November 2005 – Firefox, the world best browser.

Not only that, but the Mozilla team, true to Open Source spirit, regularly updated the browser. More specifically, they patched any flaw very rapidly.

5. Ruby on Rails – October 10th, 2005

Thanks to launching with Ruby on Rails, Twitter has managed to raise $25M at the end of this year.

Ruby on Rails is a Rapid Web Development framework built using Ruby, an open-source and truly object-oriented programming language.

I am quite fond of Matsumoto-san’s Ruby language and hence I founded a local Ruby user Group.

Ruby on Rails has made the development of new web services a disarmingly simple thing to do. The very implementation of the Rails framework enables you not to have to repeat yourself in your code. Actually, a lot of the code is automatically generated.

Thanks to David Heinemeier Hansson and thousand of other contributors, RoR is and will continue to be a driving force for evolving Web 2.0 because it’s now easy and fast to build new applications. It’s also worth mentioning that RoR now incorporates AJAX functionality by default.

6. Open-source

I have been involved in Linux User Groups and the open-source community for more than a decade and I use and recommend open-source software for that much to enterprises and individuals alike.

Open-source continues to grow as an influential way of building technology and businesses. Sometimes, the open-source product is better engineered than the commercial product, since:

Companies usually operate in an economy of resources mode and management often have no clue what development is about.

In the open-source world, “with sufficient eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”, meaning that someone, somewhere in the world is an expert in solving exactly the problem or bug that the software has and can do so in a small period of time.

Therefore, building proprietary solutions from scratch is an increasingly losing battle. It is much better to build around open-source software and open standards, ensuring interoperability and robustness.

Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, Ubuntu, Google, Apple Mac OS X are all built with or around open-source software.

By the way, Eric Raymond, the term ‘open source’ won – we rarely hear of Free Software anymore. However, let’s not forget the seminal work of Richard Stallman.

At the close of 2009, one of the most impressive companies of the decade relies heavily on Open-source software, contributes heavily to the Open-Source community and has evolved into a major player in several industries by building a hybrid business model:

Proprietary or closed-sourced core algorithms and technology
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Heavily leverage open-source technology and contribute back to the community

That company is Google and is a great model for merging technology and business and succeeding in the digital age and the knowledge economy. Note that to replicate Google’s success, you also have to rely heavily on Engineers and Engineering in Computer Science.